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Reflections on Modernity, Civilization, and Genocide
| Article
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11926 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
6,641 Words |
| Author
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Richard L. Rubenstein
Richard L. Rubenstein is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished
Professor of Religion at Florida State University and
president of the Washington Institute for Values in Public
Policy. He is the coauthor (with John K. Roth) of Approaches
to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy |
Although there have been thousands of books written about the destruction of the European Jews, until recently few have been devoted to the problem of genocide per se. At the 1983 convention of the American Political Science Association, a session on genocide featuring papers by a number of leading authorities drew an audience of no more than ten. It is this writer's thesis that the relative silence on the subject of genocide stems from the unwillingness of both the scholars and their audiences to confront the fact that, far from being a relapse into barbarism, genocide has been an intrinsic expression of modern civilization. Put differently, the genocidal destructiveness of our era may very well be an expression of some of its most significant political, moral, religious, and demographic tendencies. If indeed genocide expresses some, though obviously not all, of the dominant trends in contemporary civilization, it would hardly be surprising that few researchers would want to spend much time on the night side of the world we have made for ourselves.
The Destruction of Australia's Aborigine Population
In a recent essay, Professor Tony Barta of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, has raised the issue of the connection between civilization and genocide most directly. According to Barta, the basic fact of his nation's history has been the conquest of the country by one people and the dispossession "with ruthless destructiveness" of another people, the aborigines, those who were there ab origine, "from the beginning." Barta argues that, although it was by no means the initial intention of the British government to destroy the aborigines, Australia is nevertheless a "nation founded on genocide," for genocide was the inevitable, though unintended, consequence of the European colonization of the Australian continent. Barta's thesis puts him somewhat at odds with those scholars who insist that genocide is the intentional extermination of the target group. According to Barta, in order to comprehend genocide we need a conception that embraces relations of destruction and deemphasizes the elements of policy and intention with which the term is normally associated. Barta argues that Australian history amply demonstrates that genocidal outcome can arise without deliberate state planning. Far from being a consequence of the actions of isolated men acting out their aggressions on a lawless frontier, the destruction of Australia's aboriginal population was largely the projected outcome of modernizing transformations in the mother country, the first European nation fully to enter the economically rationalized world of the modern era.
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